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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 13
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The garden where the 'passion-fruit hang gold above an open doorway' is associated with the 'single vison' of the childhood Eden, but 'single vision dies'. In the nearby cemetery the 'bright lizard' is the image of 'The moment of animal joy', but the 'maimed gravestones' imply mortality and loss (the 27 year -old poet is back in Brighton for the funeral of an uncle). Earlier, at 21, the poet had returned to the house to find 'no fault' in his father but knew that 'Nor can we thus be friends till we are foes', for he had to break free even from his father's 'light and sympathetic yoke' if he was to grow. He would leave, but bearing with him the image of his father 'rooted like a tree in the land's love'. Returning at 40 to see his aged father, he is charmed by that smile that 'like a low sun on water / tells of a cross to come', but perhaps the cross implies also rebirth, for he sees his father against the background of spring in the garden, and although he can 'mourn the fishing net / hung up to dry', image of the man whose gardening days are almost over, he can also see 'where crocuses lift the earth'.Several years before returning to Otago for the Burns Fellowship, in a poem in which he mourns the 'desecrated earth', the possible destruction by 'atom cloud' in a world where we seem to have only 'our Christ of death . . . A child that has no breath / Not able to be born', he yet imagines a drunk walking Scroggs Hill Road and seeing 'a blaze of light / In a sod hut' that reveals a Maori Mary and a 'Christ of fire' from which vision the drunk would come down to the town. And praise the living scene With an unwounded tongue. In the land where I was born. |
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